


Kara Danvers: Ornithologist

by OxfordOctopus



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Birdwatching, F/F, Fluff, Gen, One Shot, Social Anxiety, Supercorptober 2020, ornithology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:13:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26823454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: Now, let it be said, Kara knew that wild animals werenot, in fact, harmless, even despite her immense durability. They might not be able to harm her, but the chaos they could cause - and more to the point, the damage they could cause toother people- was significant. She knew that, okay? She’d had it drilled into her head repeatedly by Eliza and Alex - who she wasfinallygetting along with after all this time - and, just. She wasn’t careless.The duck was an accident.
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 11
Kudos: 276





	Kara Danvers: Ornithologist

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in one sitting without a beta because the idea got lodged into my head like a tumor.
> 
> Sorry if there's any weird inconsistencies as a result. Hope you enjoy.

It all started about a year after she had landed on earth.

By that time, Kara had, at least in her own opinion, grown moderately used to the effects of a yellow sun. People, social norms, fitting in—those would take more time to come to her, to chip away at what humanity saw as being socially stilted, but had been in her memories just how people _acted_. Still, she’d figured out the whole strength thing, had stopped randomly floating at inopportune times, was steadily working her way through weekly nightmares, and she felt, for the first time since she’d watched Krypton blast apart into chunks behind her, like she was making progress, that she had finally found some sort of equilibrium.

Which, of course, meant that the world had to drop something else into her lap.

Now, let it be said, Kara knew that wild animals were _not_ , in fact, harmless, even despite her immense durability. They might not be able to harm her, but the chaos they could cause - and more to the point, the damage they could cause to _other people_ \- was significant. She knew that, okay? She’d had it drilled into her head repeatedly by Eliza and Alex - who she was _finally_ getting along with after all this time - and, just. She wasn’t careless.

The duck was an accident.

She’d been out on one of her nature walks at the time, the handful of hours she graced herself with whenever the world got too... restrictive. Memories of the pod still weighed on her head like a leaded blanket and every once and a while even the house felt a little too enclosed. She’d spend her time tracing the trails walked by others, glancing up at the sky, wearing whatever she wanted, moving at her own pace, to her own whims.

There was a body of water somewhere between a pond and a lake further into the woods surrounding her home. It wasn’t _quite_ big enough to call a lake, nor was it small and shallow enough to justify calling a pond. It was just barely deep enough that the average-sized adult - using Eliza as a reference point, anyway - would have trouble keeping their head above water at the deepest, and it stretched out across the uneven forest floor for some distance, tucked away into the side of a few rolling hills.

It was a favourite of hers, mostly because it was a hotspot for birds. She hadn’t expected to find any when she’d arrived, admittedly, it was winter and most of the birds had fled further south outside of the ones who stayed year-round. The occasional chickadee, a handful of crows—not exactly social demographics, for sure, but it hadn’t stopped her from watching and enjoying the sight of fluffy, black-feathered birds hop and gutturally scream at one another over a discarded tin can.

Except, what she found wasn’t crows or wintering birds or even the random occurrence of other wildlife, like squirrels.

She found a duck. A duck not twenty paces from the body of water, one wing bent at an unspeakable angle, letting out little noises of pain. It kept trying to waddle its way towards the body of water, but would falter, one of its flippers always giving out on it. It’d likely hit something mid-flight, she even could recognize some damage to a nearby tree, where pine needles had been stripped away from something hitting it hard, and the ground nearest to the tree was scuffed, thrown up around the edges, frostbitten lichen scraped away due to an impact.

For a moment, she couldn’t help but just kinda... _watch_ it. There was no real justification for it then, to let something suffer and attempt to meander its way over to the body of water, to stand there, stock-still and unsure, as something else tried to overcome its pain. Do nothing to help it.

Then, she took a step forward.

The duck’s head snapped around to her, a croaky warning quack bubbling in the back of its beak, edged by more pain. Its feathers fluffed, its body tightened, it looked all the world both terrified and intensely hostile. It did not want her there, it did not want her help, if anything it actively could not imagine taking it.

So what compelled her to take another step, and then another, ignoring the increasingly intense noises of warning from the waterfowl, was frankly completely and utterly beyond her.

Before she really knew what she was doing, Kara had closed the distance between herself and the duck and had crouched down, despite all warnings, despite not knowing how to actually _tend to a duck_. Even though it was wild, even though it clearly really hated her and despite every last warning Eliza had made her repeat like a mantra, she couldn’t help herself.

The duck was wounded. That, simply, would not do.

* * *

“Kara,” Eliza said the word with unhidden exhaustion.

Jeremiah, hand pressed over his mouth and shoulders shuddering with restrained mirth, stood beside her.

Alex was, of course, up in her room, completely unaware.

“She’s hurt,” Kara explained, the duck tucked against her mud-soaked shirt. She’d figured out that the duck had been a girl sometime during the period where it had repeatedly tried to maul her, to little effect. It had taken two hours of persistent cajoling, but at this point the duck was mostly sedate.

That or resigned, she couldn’t really tell.

“Yes, honey,” Eliza tried again, this time her voice going for soothing. “But sometimes animals _get_ hurt, you can’t just take every hurt animal in.”

Kara stared blankly ahead. “Of course I can’t.” That was _obvious_ , thank-you-very-much. She knew she couldn’t house every last animal, okay? “But this one?”

“It does seem pretty docile,” Jeremiah said, considering.

Eliza snapped her head around to him, a look of betrayal on her features. “It’s _wild_ , Jer!” She hissed right back, as though Kara wasn’t here and didn’t have enhanced hearing abilities and could _literally hear what they were saying_.

“We tamed wild wolves,” Jeremiah tried, again.

Eliza threw her arms up. “As newborns! That’s a fully grown duck!”

The duck in question, name still to be decided, quacked tiredly.

Jeremiah’s smile broadened, almost teasingly. “And yet, it seems to be handling Kara well.”

Eliza stared daggers at her husband for a while, bringing to mind vivid memories of the time she’d caught her own mom reaming her father for eating the last off-world cookies they’d brought back on one of their trips. After a moment, she glanced back at the duck, then to Jeremiah, before huffing. “Fine, but if that so much as tries to bite one of us, _I am going to cook it_.”

And that was, in the end, how Kara ended up spending the remainder of winter break putting a duck house together with Jeremiah.

* * *

Sally - the duck, name decided on by Alex in a moment of frustration when Kara hadn’t been able to figure one out, and it had just kinda _stuck_ \- outlived Jeremiah by a year.

Both deaths had been crushing, and so had the things that followed it. Alex pulled away again, Eliza was overcome by grief, the house grew a bit too quiet, a bit impersonal over the year after Jeremiah’s death.

She took to walking the trail over and over again after Sally died, not entirely sure what to do with herself. Sally hadn’t ever quite acclimated to being house-bound, but at the same time, in hindsight, she hadn’t had much of a choice, either. Her wing had been broken in all the wrong ways, it would never be fully operable again, and eventually Kara was pretty sure she had come to see the small little region of the backyard they’d fenced off for her as her own.

Kara got better, in her own opinion, at social things—at _blending in_ , for lack of a better term. She didn’t make any new friends, and going into high school hadn’t brought any new changes with it either. Midvale was a small town, affluent, yes, but very, very small. Everyone who went to middle school went to high school together, and her reputation carried, however unfortunate that might be.

She made a friend in Kenny Li.

Lost a friend, just like Jeremiah, just like Sally.

It was not long after that, tracing that same old trail, that an impulse overcame her. An impulse she hadn’t had in a while, but an impulse nevertheless. She knew better than to feed into it, knew better than to consider it, but it’d always been there, floating in the back of her head like an intrusive thought. She had just been in a better place to overcome it.

Her steps took her out of the forest, down the long, winding sidewalk into the actual city, up the road, to the right, and up to one of the farming retailers. She walked in, mud-caked shoes and all, ignored the odd looks she was getting from the cashier, and very, very firmly asked for a baby chicken.

When asked why, she told them it was for school.

They believed her.

* * *

Clucks was a considerably easier venture to handle. Eliza hadn’t made a comment on it, and Alex was too busy getting into fights with Vicki Donahue to pay any attention to her. She was pretty sure Eliza didn’t _approve_ , especially not after she spent a lot of time and a solid 90% of her “savings” - however much that can mean anything when you’re getting an allowance - to retrofit the waterlogged duck house into a proper henhouse, but the occasional bag of feed would randomly pop up, and Eliza’s silence was, in a way, itself its own form of permission.

Watching Clucks grow, however cliche, felt like it... _unlocked_ something in her, for lack of a better term. The process of biological growth, the sleepy blinking eyes, the little calls she made—it made her curious. She hadn’t been curious in years, not since Krypton, not since she was slated to join the Science Guild and all that entailed. Earth was, for better or for worse, strictly speaking completely and utterly behind her for the most part. Her advantage would probably wean off if she followed scientific education into college, to be fair, you can only teach a child so much in so many hours, but she didn’t really have to try at school - hadn’t had to try at _anything_ , really, outside of social situations and look where _that_ had gotten her - in a very long time.

She started watching birds, more than she normally did. She’d spend the hours she wasn’t beholden to caring for Clucks and her fussy eating habits staring at them in the trees, keeping a record of them in her notebook, sketching them. Doing everything in her power to look them up, find out what made one bird different from the other, even if they looked very similar. Christmas that year netted her a high-quality camera and a small collection of encyclopedias specifically for avians.

To be completely honest, that was about the point where her fascination with birds turned into a passion.

* * *

“What do you want to do?” Mrs. Hubbard, the guidance counsellor, finally asked.

Kara stared back, completely and utterly not sure how to respond to that. It was her last year at high school, she could do more or less anything she wanted outside of _maybe_ history and English literature. Those were places where her interstellar knowledge could do her precisely nothing to aid and she was almost always too busy looking after Clucks, having aged to the point where it was starting to become necessary, or looking for new birds, photographing them, adding them to a wall.

Instead of vocalizing any of that, Kara shrugged.

Mrs. Hubbard frowned, a thoughtful expression slipping over her features shortly after. She spun in her computer chair, reaching down to one of the drawers on her desk and, with a few short tugs and some rummaging, pulled out the local newspaper.

On it was one of her photos. One that Alex had sent in after she had refused to do so. It was of a red-crested cardinal, very rare in this part of the continent, almost unheard of, really. They didn’t like people, but she had spent the majority of an entire day lying in wait until she could get _just_ the right perfect shot. It had come out really good, in her opinion.

“You took this, right?” Mrs. Hubbard asked, flicking through the scant few pages that made up the school’s newspaper. “You said you had an interest in birds, what about that?”

Kara shrugged. Again.

“Just, please consider it?” Mrs. Hubbard tried, and Kara forced a reassuring smile to her face to give the woman some room to breathe. She was fifty-going-on-sixty, with a head of curly gray hair and a perpetual wrinkly cast to her face. Kara was sometimes worried she’d fall over at any time, frail-looking enough to be daunted by a weak breeze.

“Alright.”

* * *

She got into National City University almost accidentally, really. She’d sent out applications more or less to wherever they would fit, throwing Mrs. Hubbard’s idea at the wall to see if it would stick.

Turns out, National City University, alongside a relatively well-known arts and marketing department, and its regularly-lauded bio-engineering course, had courses for ornithology. Well, more specifically, she was accepted for a Bachelor’s in Wildlife Biology and intended, as far as Eliza had helped her plan, to get a Master’s - and possibly, eventually, a Ph.D. - with an emphasis on ornithology.

She got in on a scholarship too, which was nice. Her own scientific background was starting to come up a bit empty, though, too many things that humans hadn’t _quite_ figured out yet combined with gaps that would’ve been filled, had she continued her career on Krypton. Still, it said something that she could think about Krypton nowadays without that pervasive _ache_ , that emptiness that drove her to walk in circles on a muddy path until her head would stop being so noisy.

Clucks died the summer leading into her university admission. She took apart the henhouse and buried her with it out back, capped by a small stone that only she, Eliza, and to some extent Alex knew the importance of. It wasn’t much, but it felt... nice, final, like putting everything to rest after all this time.

Alex had been, admittedly, less than impressed she was following her to National City, but then Alex wasn’t impressed with her a whole lot lately. She spent a lot of time out partying, she’d heard the yelling matches - albeit from a distance - that Eliza and Alex had spiralled into as of late. So she just took her opinion into account, acknowledged it, but did precisely nothing more with it, primarily because she wasn’t well-equipped to deal with Eliza’s constant pressuring of Alex or Alex’s habitual need to prove herself.

At least this time she didn’t buy a bird.

* * *

That was a lie. She bought another bird.

Well, not bought. _Found_ might be more operative, really. A pigeon’s egg that had been haphazardly left on her dorm’s windowsill like a gift from an outside influence. The dorm had, with the exclusion of medical aid animals, a wholesale ban on pets. Understandable, if anything it made a whole lot of sense not to trust university students with pets like cats or dogs because not long after you’d probably find out you’ve made an entirely new ecosystem just in the dorm buildings alone.

That, however, did not stop her from keeping it. Or incubating it. Or getting special permission from one of her teachers who _really_ liked her to play the entire thing off as a long-term project towards her study of how city-dwelling has modified the behaviours and physiology of native bird species in the region.

It technically wasn’t a pet if it was a project, and all that.

Thank god she didn’t have a roommate. She wasn’t great at lying but she was pretty sure it would not hold up in the face of someone who was around her for any length of time.

Cook, the male pigeon she was now rearing, was docile, fat and the laziest bird she had ever met. It was _fascinating_ , but also very very nice. Cook was really the first bird which let her touch them, brush her fingers over their crest, observe their talons and all the other fun things. She hadn’t known how to properly handle Sally back when she first got her, and by the time she had, Sally was old and holding her would only ever end up with her thrashing, so it wasn’t safe. Clucks was better about it, but had been a notoriously flighty hen with snappish tendencies that had made physical contact largely impossible.

Cook was the equivalent of a male ginger cat: spoiled rotten, but too lazy to be particularly rotten.

Birds served to be something of a perpetually rotating door of new and interesting things. Kryptonian birds, aside from being extinct for hundreds of years due to core mining destabilizing their cliff habitats, were only abstractly similar. They were both feathered, both laid eggs, but Kryptonian birds, for starters, did _not_ have gizzards. She wasn’t sure why - though, her guess was that it was because after a certain point there weren’t really any rocks the birds could eat that weren’t also poisonous - but they just didn’t, and finding out that birds _ate rocks to grind food up_ had been absolutely one of the highlights of her youth.

The worn pages of her encyclopedia could attest to that.

Just, _gizzards_. How could something like that even evolve? She wanted to find out, wanted to _know_ , and she did everything in her power to find it out. She read papers, did research, she had avenues open to explore all those questions that high school science teachers couldn’t answer, or things which only had theories and weren’t taught as a direct consequence. It was like being a fish in a pond for her.

She didn’t even realize she was reaching the end of her Bachelor’s until someone brought the fact up to her.

* * *

“I want you to try for this,” Professor Vance said, sliding the slip of paper over to her.

Curious, Kara plucked it by one edge and brought it up. At the very top, ‘CATCO WORLDWIDE MEDIA’ was written in a huge, distinct font, and below that was a rather blunt four paragraphs on the new nature magazine they were working on. They were looking for prospective photographers and scientists to apply for a chance to be hired or at least interned for a promised three editions at the minimum, with more if the magazine’s profit margins were high enough.

Kara glanced back up.

Professor Vance smiled. “You’re nearing the point where you have to start looking for experience work, right? I mean, keeping your grades as they are will keep you in a scholarship if you want to just move straight to your Master’s, but I’d really prefer it if you considered this. I’m friends with one of the people who pushed for this, she promised she’d give your work a look if you sent it in after I showed her a few of the pictures you left me with of Cook.”

This was... definitely an option, for sure. She wasn’t sure she wanted to do it, but the fact that she could get in on the ground for something like this, that it was there, that there was no real harm in _trying_ \- after all, despite the rule about not being involved with newspapers or the news in general, this didn’t technically qualify, did it? - for better or for worse. She wanted to try, wanted to do something, wanted to explore more and maybe have the way she saw the world be something other people could empathize with, or even understand.

She thought back to the newspaper for a moment, to how it had put her here in the first place. After waffling so much on what she wanted to do, on where she wanted to go, to find out that the option of taking up this line of study had been such a _smart_ option, one that had been so fulfilling, well.

It felt like a sign.

She just hoped to Rao it wasn’t an omen.

* * *

She had learned, maybe in her second year at NCU, that most of her wardrobe was not going to work with the outdoor labs and observation studies that had become part of her life. She’d, with great reluctance, shucked her fondly-loved pastels for a wardrobe mostly consisting of heavy-duty and androgynous clothing. A lot of durable pants, a lot of t-shirts, few skirts, more shorts than anyone had any right to own, boots. So many boots.

Which, as it would happen, is not the type of wardrobe you should be wearing in the event that you’re meeting one of the richest women on the planet. Cat Grant, media mogul, she had clawed her way up from her beginning as an aide to Perry White and had carved out a cranny for herself in the international media circus that defined human culture.

She might be five-two on a good day, but she was as intimidating as any person Kara had met.

Cat’s eyes, roving over her dress pants, dress shoes - that she had borrowed from Alex after panicking, they didn’t quite fit right—too small for her feet, left her toes cramped like nobody’s business - white dress shirt and tie, felt at the same time an attempt to observe her and to criticize her choice in clothing.

Not that it had been a choice, considering this was about all she had left in terms of “formal wear”. She hadn’t needed to be formal in years! She was a researcher for _birds_ , do you know where birds generally like to be? Not in places you can navigate in a pencil skirt, is where.

“Very...” Cat Grant, the woman who had taken time out of her day to assess whether or not she deserved to belong to the fledgling nature magazine, a woman who didn’t _have to do that_ since she was pretty sure she could hand the job off to anyone else, hesitated. She hesitated, tilted her head, glanced askance towards one of the monitors behind her, one lit up by a rainbow. Something about another country in Europe legalizing gay marriage. “Butch.”

Kara felt her face heat up, opened her mouth to correct, but couldn’t quite manage it. At all. Words, in general, were beyond her right now because Kara was _pretty sure Cat Grant thought she was a butch outdoorswoman and it was very surreal_. Oh god, please help. She should’ve listened to Eliza’s rules, she should’ve just kept doing labs and got her Master’s instead of trying for any of this—

“Close your mouth, for Pete's sake,” Cat—no, er, Miss Grant? That felt better—Miss Grant said in that sort of tone parents used on unruly children.

Kara’s mouth clicked shut. Thankfully she could at least follow orders.

“So this is mostly a formality, Lindsey has reassured me repeatedly that you're a good student of hers and that she has all the trust in the world for you,” Miss Grant drawled, leaning back onto one of her too-thin heels, eyes narrowing. “Can’t say I personally see it yet, but then Lindsey hasn’t lied to me yet.”

Professor Vance hadn’t said her friend was _the woman herself_.

She really should’ve! That was _pertinent information_ —

“Are you going to say anything?” Miss Grant interrupted.

Kara reached up on impulse, fiddled with the frame of her glasses, pushing them back up the sweat-slicked bridge of her nose. “I like birds,” she said, stupidly. On impulse. Because she was a moron and all of her social interaction over the last four years of study had been with other people who were equally socially inept.

Miss Grant blinked, looking for a half-second completely bewildered, before her face settled back into neutral semi-disdain. “Yes,” she confirmed easily. “Your pictures said as much.”

“I would like the job?” Kara tried, the words coming out in a rush.

“Then you’ll have it,” Miss Grant said, raising one hand up to prevent any words coming out of her mouth, not that she was about to speak or anything. “But, sincerely, work on... _talking_. I expect more from my employees, and interns are no exception.”

* * *

The first couple of months working as an intern and balancing her continued studies was, in all honesty, pretty rough. It took a while to find an equilibrium between the two, where she wasn’t constantly behind on one thing, and it had taken some pretty severe restructuring to her schedule.

Most of her coworkers for the new potential nature magazine were older, people who had worked in the field for more years than she had been alive for, including those she’d spent in the Phantom Zone. Most of them were men, with a few women thrown in for good measure, and a handful of them weren’t very fond of her. She was the youngest by no small margin, and she hadn’t made much of an impact yet, hadn’t yet proven herself to them.

But things got better. Alex at some point finished up her own schooling and went on to do secretive lab things that she thought Kara didn’t know about. Eliza got back to working in the xenobiology field, on-and-off, and the time spent over Thanksgivings and Christmases were defined by a near-constant chatter of scientific intrigue. It was nice, not quite a change, but more of things settling in.

She got her own apartment, even. It had been grandfathered to her by Alex, to be fair, and was absurdly cheap for the region _and_ it required she balance a part-time job with an internship _and_ a university degree but, well. She managed.

“You raised a pigeon, right?”

Kara blinked up at her coworker, one Richard Blackler. He was an older gentleman, in his mid-to-late sixties, with a head of absurdly thick graying hair that showed no sign of receding. “Yes?” She answered, or at least tried. Social things were _still_ hard, she again hadn’t spent much of any time in university bothering to socialize and her restrictive friend pool hadn’t grown beyond Alex and a few others in a long, long time.

“They still around?” Richard continued.

Kara shook her head. “No, died five months ago.” Normally, pigeons lived to about six years—Cook had made it to four, in large part due to her spoiling him on food and his general distaste towards anything athletic. He’d just passed away in his sleep one day, and unlike Clucks, due to how she’d pitched Cook, she didn’t get to bury him.

Or, well, she didn’t in theory. Cook went ‘mysteriously missing’ after he had been acquired by the university and while people probably had their suspicions, there was no way to prove that she did it, considering she had flown to the roof of the building and broken in that way. She’d buried him back home after another flight, right beside Clucks.

“Either way,” Richard began, smiling guilelessly. “How would you feel about a short trip to Metropolis?”

...Not great? Clark was uh, _upset_ wasn’t the operative word. Clark didn’t really get _upset_ with her. Maybe ‘disappointed’ might be better? He just, they hadn’t talked in a while. Like, three years a while, because she had been busy and she was bad at opening up lines of communication and—

“You’ll get your name on the article. It’s about how city birds have adapted.” Richard’s smile grew _significantly_ less guileless, and suddenly Kara had the ominous sensation that she had walked into a trap. “After all, that’s what you were doing an extra study on, _right_?”

...Ah. Shoot.

She’d forgotten about that.

* * *

Clark met her at the airport with Lois. He’d taken one long look at her, her outfit - jeans, big mountain-hiking boots, a huge backpack, and a massive sweater - and pulled her into a tight hug, saying how he’d missed her.

She’d returned the hug, empowered by her own guilt and the fact that Clark was among some of the few people she could hug at full strength without risking crushing them to a pulp.

“So, you said a few weeks, but do you know how long you’ll be staying with us exactly?” Clark asked sometime into their drive towards his place, one hand steady on the wheel as he stared, looking _utterly bored_ , at the red light in front of him.

“Twenty days, if that’s okay?” Kara managed to get out, folding her hands together. “I can find another place to stay if—”

“Nope,” Lois interrupted brightly, and Kara couldn’t help the tug of her own lips pulling up into a smile, even as she buried her chin in the fluff of her oversized sweater. “You’re staying with us, and if Clark has an _issue_ with that...”

“Which I don’t,” Clark said airily, pulling the car back into motion as the light turned to green. Someone behind them leaned on the horn, and Kara winced.

“Which he doesn’t,” Lois echoed, not missing a beat. “But if he did, he’d be sleeping on the couch. Outside. In the _rain_. Because I’m not letting my boyfriend’s little cousin get exploited by the absolute shit housing market in our fine city.”

“Wait,” Kara interrupted. Because, well. Wait. “Boyfriend?”

Lois and Clark turned to look at her. She shrunk back.

Lois, without looking up, aimed a swat at Clark’s head. He yelped, the car lurched a little, but didn’t stray too far. “Eyes on the road, Smallville, and _seriously_ you didn’t tell her?!”

“I thought she knew! I wasn’t exactly subtle!”

“Yeah, well, she clearly doesn’t!”

“We’ve been dating for nearly ten years now! _I thought it was obvious!_ ”

* * *

One of the benefits nobody tells you about when you’re gifted yellow sun derived superpowers is that you don’t get sore, or achy, or _anything_. Kara had vivid memories of having regular morning cramps as a kid in her legs during her growth period, the sort of charlie horse-esque bundles of agony.

Normally this wouldn’t really be a very _real_ benefit. Sure, she might never wake up with an ache in her back because she slept wrong, but in any other line of work that would just be nice. Not something that informed her day-to-day.

But when she spent hours on her stomach, perched into awful positions that she _knew_ should be doing some pretty awful things to her musculature, all to take a photo of a pair of pigeons and a crow in some half-lit, dingy alleyway smelling like a laundromat, well. It became important. Very important. She got a lot of very real envy for being able to get up after a photoshoot like this sort of thing without even wincing, still limber despite the horrible things she had been doing to her posture.

Admittedly she wasn’t totally fond of the fact that she was laying in an alleyway with her camera out and it was _really not hygienic_ under any definition of the word, and everything kinda smelled, and there was a cigarette butt a few feet away from her that didn’t _really smell like nicotine_ , no sir, but she’d take the upsides to the downsides. She kinda had to, considering the series of events that led her to laying down in some alleyway on an alien planet.

Finally, after hours of patience, after everything, she was lining up her shot. The camera Eliza gave her all of those years ago still felt sturdy in her hands, perfectly suited to fit between her palms. She could see the pigeons finally settle in, looking relaxed even despite how close the crow was, who themselves seemed to be content as well. It would be a _perfect_ image to run with for her article and—

“Oh my god, are you okay?!”

The birds flew away.

Kara felt something inside of her die.

Turning her head slowly, achingly, to find the source of the voice which had just ruined _hours_ of sitting around on the awful shitty ground of Metropolis all to get a single photo she _kinda didn’t need_ but that sunk cost fallacy had rendered impossibly important, Kara finally set her sights on the person in question.

It was a woman, about her height, with long, black hair, bright green eyes, and lips almost cherry red. Her skin was that sort of pale that seemed almost washed out, though there was a hint of colour to her cheeks from the cold outside. She had high cheekbones that led down into a defined jaw and chin. She spoke with a slight Irish lilt, very disconnected, a long-faded accent, a bit like the one she had.

She was, in a word, very, very pretty.

Stupidly pretty.

Like, _end of the world pretty_.

“The, birds,” Kara managed to get out between her stupid lips and stupid brain that was currently trying to process the pretty woman staring down at her. The one wearing the sort of business casual with long pants and heels, all the things she had tried to be with her wardrobe during that one meeting with Miss Grant that had brought her here in the first place.

The woman’s eyes flicked up, caught sight of the birds flapping wildly to new spots. Her eyes glanced down, caught sight of her camera, clutched tightly, and her face widened into shock, then guilt. “Oh, _shite_ ”—the last word was murmured beneath her breath quickly, like she was afraid of someone overhearing it—“I am so sorry, were you about to take a photo?”

Kara nodded, because words were frankly beyond her and—actually, thinking about it, why did this always happen around women? She could look a man down and say exactly what she thought but when it came to women she just, y’know, couldn’t.

Actually, on second thought, now really wasn’t the time.

“Jeez, I just—that’s bad. I am so sorry, I don’t think they’re coming back down.”

Kara spared the birds a glance, all puffed up and looking mightily offended by being interrupted in their naps. They probably weren’t, yeah.

“Here, uh,” the woman reached into one pocket, rummaging around until she could procure a card-sized piece of paper. Reaching up to one ear, she plucked the pen out from behind it, scribbling something down before, finally, crouching down and handing it off to her. “I know this is really suspect, but, if you need any help within reason, call this number? I have to go and yell at someone.”

Kara glanced down.

The words ‘Lena Luthor’ and a long string of digits which constituted a phone number stared back up at her.

Her mind ground to a shuddering halt.

* * *

Jack was laughing hysterically by the time she stormed back into the classroom.

“You absolute dick!” Lena yelled, pointing at him.

It only made him laugh harder. The ass, the childish, fucking _absurd ass_.

“You could’ve told me!” Lena continued, unabated, because Jesus Christ was that _fucking_ embarrassing.

She’d walked up to the window not five minutes ago because Jack kept getting distracted by something out there, and she’d looked down to find a woman on her face, legs splayed out, tense as a wire. Assuming the worst, and not having Jack to rectify that assumption, she’d run down to check to make sure she wasn’t out cold or worse yet _dead_ and—and—

“Stop laughing!” She wailed.

Her best friend doubled over, laugh sputtering off into a wild series of unsteady breaths. He wiped his eyes, a snort escaping him in a woosh every few seconds. “You didn’t ask,” he teased, glancing up at her from between his fingers. “She had to have been down there for like three hours. All for some pigeons.”

Lena had been trained to be socially adroit, had been all but groomed to be publicly adored, and despite Lex’s continued attempts to ram the family name into the dirt, she had managed that much.

Or at least, she had thought she did.

“God damn it, Jack,” Lena managed to get out with a sigh.

Jack started laughing again, the prick.

* * *

Clark and Lois sat around the table with her. The card was in the center of the table, innocuous blue ink standing out against the white-and-black of what, upon closer inspection, was a small advertisement for a gay bar.

She, purposefully, did not look at Clark.

“You’ve been here for five days,” Lois said, not sounding terribly surprised.

“Under a week,” Clark agreed with a _hum_ , voice gravelly. “New record?”

Lois, out of the corner of her eye, paused, head tilting thoughtfully. “Think so?”

“It’s the Kryptonian curse,” Clark said sagely, or at least, sagely enough that Kara had to remind herself he was being _sarcastic_ and there was, hopefully, not a literal curse attuned to Kryptonians out there. She had been given bedtime stories about the cults who had worshiped Yuda Kal and what they would do to kids who stayed up too late. “But, more seriously, you probably shouldn’t do anything with this.”

“I wasn’t even sure what I was _going_ to do with this,” Kara muttered, reaching for it.

Lois swatted her hand. “A pretty girl gave you her number on the back of a girl bar advertisement, I think that warrants _something_.”

“Lois,” Clark said, voice tinged with a warning. “She is a Luthor.”

“And Zod’s a Kryptonian, but that hasn’t stopped me from—”

Kara leapt to her feet with enough force to send the chair away, snatching the card up and pressing both hands to her ears. “Nope!” She yelled, waddling back and towards the guest bedroom, ignoring Lois’ unbidden cackles. “Not thinking about that! I’m going to go study!”

* * *

Idle curiosities, if not previously made clear, were her banes. The card had sat like a hunk of particularly volatile uranium in her bag throughout the remainder of her stay in Metropolis, even after. Her thoughts had constantly been dragged back towards it, even when she’d been awkwardly congratulated for her article and the interest people had taken in the magazine. Even when she was raised from intern to part-time - she had an actual _salary_ now, she didn’t have to work at Noonan’s, and however much she would miss the free food, she wouldn’t _ever_ miss working retail - her thoughts would, inevitably, be dragged back to it.

The curiosity never really left her. Not even after Lex Luthor was arrested after killing over 30 people in an attempt to murder her cousin. Half the reason she knew anything about it was because she’d become _fixated_ on seeing how Lena responded, seeing her take the reigns, seeing her push for a rebranding.

She didn’t forget about her when she decided to finish her Master’s early, stopped taking her time with the sciences and pushed herself far, far ahead of where people had assumed her to be, finishing everything out before the year ended.

Even when her sister’s plane fell, even when she plucked it out of the sky. Even when she revealed herself to Winn, a coworker who regularly came over to the nature magazine’s office for reasons completely beyond her. Even after Astra, even after Myriad, even after Non and Fort Rozz and flying up into space and nearly _dying_.

She never forgot. It was the intrusive thought to end all intrusive thoughts, the card still tucked away in her sock drawer, waiting for the chance to be used.

* * *

It had been a while since she needed to dress up. This time, however, she had the disposable income to afford some things and didn’t have to steal her sister’s shoes, so that was a plus. It wasn’t that much different from the ensemble she’d worn those years ago when she’d met Miss Grant, though at least this time around it was refined. She wore the same dark dress pants, and with her own set of dress shoes, alongside a button-up white dress shirt, with sleeves rolled to her elbows.

Lena Luthor’s secretary stared back at her, utterly unimpressed. “Name and appointment?” She drawled.

Kara tried not to fidget. “Uhm, er—Kara Danvers, with CatCo Nature? Here to interview Miss Luthor about her new push for environmentally friendly tech?” More specifically her recent developments in helping regrow the redwood forests, in the canopies of which were actual ecosystems that needed protection.

The secretary stared narrowly at her, suspicious and unwelcoming but, thankfully, Kara had grown up enough not to fold beneath it.

Letting out a sigh, the woman motioned towards the door. “She’s waiting for you.”

* * *

Lena Luthor had been having a _trying_ few months. Lex had gone insane, she’d had to help sentence her brother to multiple life sentences, she’d had to take over L-Corp, break off her friendship with Jack - as, despite joking about it, both of them weren’t comfortable with being any more than each other’s beards - by leaving Metropolis. She’d had to deal with Clark _motherfucking_ Kent breathing down her neck not a few days ago. She’d had to deal with the fact that Supergirl likely didn’t trust her because her brother had, repeatedly, tried to murder her cousin.

She’d had to deal with a lot. Too much, really. It was actually starting to get to her. Lena knew she could be suited to be a CEO—that much wasn’t up for debate. She could do it, she just... didn’t want to. She liked being a lab worker, liked exploring the field of study she so enjoyed, liked a lot of things about her old life.

But she had to step up to the plate, considering the other alternative was her _mother_ and if she thought Lex handled the company’s money poorly, Lilian would be a nightmare.

Running her hand over her eyes, Lena glanced back down at the report on her desk. Another bit of cash Lex had illegally squirrelled away for anti-Kryptonian weapons development. It was starting to become a pattern, to the point where she was worried she’d start finding the damn ledgers under rugs or on high shelves, considering how much he’d done to actually hide them.

Then again, nobody had even tried to look into Lex’s personal files, so it’s not a surprise he considered his own security airtight.

The door to her office opened with a steady swish, and she flicked her eyes up, catching sight just as the person opening it walked in.

Bird girl stared back at her.

...It was probably bad that it was the only name she knew her by, but ‘bird girl’ had become something of a myth among her and her close friends. Jack had made it into a joke, and it’d kinda proliferated, especially when they found out she had given her her own name and number on the back of a Frozen Strobe advertisement—that being one of the more popular gay bars in the area. Nothing about it to her had been all that funny, it had, in fact, been extremely embarrassing and she had just _finally started to forget it happened_.

Apparently, life was not so easy. “Ah,” she said, voice coming out awkwardly.

Bird girl smiled back, just as awkwardly, reaching up to fiddle with her glasses. “Hi,” she said, voice soft. “I’m, uh, Kara Danvers, with CatCo Nature. I’m here to talk about the redwood project?”

Oh. She could work with that.

* * *

One hour turned into two, then three, and one meeting into two, then three, then four. Lena really wasn’t sure how things had progressed to this point, but if you got past the shy outer shell of Kara Danvers you could find for yourself a bumbling, broadly-smiling sweetheart with an absurd love for birds.

It was... weird. Lena didn’t really _have_ friends, hadn’t for most of her life. Her family name before had been a daunting point of prestige, the Luthors were wealthy in the way that few people were. They came from old money, and lots of it, with a fair amount of prestige chasing their heels. People hadn’t wanted to be friends with her, and the ones who had just wanted what she could give them through her reputation.

She’d managed to find some friends, though. Jack, Sam, Jess, even to a certain extent Andrea of all people—and now, in National City, she had none of them. She and Jack didn’t talk much, Sam was too busy cleaning up after Lex, Jess was around, yes, but also too busy, the restructuring wasn’t a simple task, after all.

After Lex, her reputation had been ruined for different reasons. Xenophobia, hatred, things she didn’t associate with herself—people kept their distance. The gay clubs she’d gone to that one time out of a need to just _get away_ had rejected her at the door, even despite being a long-term visitor. Nobody wanted her, she tainted everything she touched.

Except for Kara, apparently.

Kara, who was sweet and kind. Kara, who didn’t care about her last name. Kara, who stayed with her until _three in the morning_ once, all to have an interview that was more them chatting than anything else. Kara whose Instagram was surprisingly popular and utterly _devoted_ to birds. Kara, who loved ducks and had duck-print pyjamas she’d shown off during one of the movie nights she’d invited her over to, which she had endured even when being stared at by distrusting eyes by Kara's adoptive sister.

Kara, who was Supergirl.

Because, really, she wasn’t _stupid_.

But that was okay, because even if Kara was Supergirl, she could keep that secret, or at least the approximation of one. They all had their secrets, all had their wants and needs and... well, Kara was her want. And her need.

Which was not something that could stand.

So she’d done as all Luthors did and _planned_. Showing absurd amounts of affection to people she felt things towards before had always backfired. Lionel had been distant and unresponsive to shows of childish affection, Lillian had been worse, she’d gone so far as to complain to her about wasting money when she’d tried once, during the holiday, to give her flowers. Lex had just never been comfortable with strong displays of affection, hadn’t known how to respond to it, and so, like Lionel, he never had.

In the end, she sent Kara an office full of flowers in the hopes that maybe it’d be _juuust_ enough to scare her off.

* * *

Lois’ words had been something of a seedling for a long, long time. A number written on the back of a girl bar ad, the sort of plot point you’d read out of a trashy romance novel you got for free or very cheap on Kindle.

She and Lena had never really _talked_ about sexuality. Kara’s had always been up in the air, and considering she’d been socially ostracized and not particularly invested in any of it, she hadn’t really dated in the first place. It was hard to explain to Alex and Eliza that Krypton didn’t really have a concrete concept of gendered attraction. The matrix did everything for you, you didn’t need to think about it. Pregnancy wasn’t an issue either, considering everyone was birthed through the matrix.

Girl, boy, neither, or something else—she hadn’t been raised to care, because, in the end, the matrix would choose the person she would have the best chance of loving, and any obligations to continue the progeny of the House of El would be handled by technology. She didn’t need to think about pregnancies, sex had been an almost primal concept on her planet; people _did_ it, sure, but people didn’t talk about it because that wasn’t the primary focus of _any_ relationship.

How could you explain that to someone who grew up being sorted into boxes? Whose concept of sexuality was tied to hard yes-or-no questions? Sure people who didn’t answer yes or no existed too—bisexual, pansexual, asexual, but these labels, they weren’t... relevant, to her. She didn’t even know what to call herself, how could she explain it to anyone else?

But, like. She wasn’t ignorant, or stupid. Or even that unaware. She knew that she had feelings for other people, however stifled, she knew what _feeling attraction_ was like.

So, yes, she might’ve been blindsided, stumbling into her office only to find it literally almost overflowing with red roses. Yes, she might’ve been a little overwhelmed too. Sure. She might’ve felt awkward for the period of time she didn’t know who it was from, or why.

But she felt... hopeful, when she found out it was Lena.

This was all new to her. She’d put aside sexuality, put aside _romance_ in large part because, well, it didn’t... work. For her. She’d never been given the option to explore it as a teenager and attempts to romance her, well, she’d shut down. Hard. She was over a decade too late to begin exploring that part of herself, she had resigned herself to just _existing_ , and she’d been fine with it, you know?

Rolling the stem of a rose between her fingers, Kara wasn’t so sure if that was the case anymore.

* * *

There were three things in life Lena had come to expect would never happen, even if it was, technically, possible.

The first was that Lex would become her brother again. Not that she had been disowned, but rather in the sense that he’d drop his xenophobic obsession and just, be her brother again. Be the person who consoled her, who took care of her when her adoptive parents couldn’t be bothered.

The next was one day clearing the Luthor name, if the first wasn’t possible. Some day, down the line, the Luthor name would no longer be associated with a mass-murderer and xenophobic technology, but she knew better than to fully expect that. Knew that it would take generations before Lex’s impact retreated from public knowledge.

The last, and final thing, was Kara asking her out on a date. Bit of a light subject to include in those other two things, she knew that, but Kara had become something of her only support line in the city at this point and you could, frankly, excuse her for putting a lot of emphasis on that.

She’d expected Kara to retreat, to pull away, to respond to her show of affection as most people had in her life.

Instead, Kara, shy, demure Kara, stood with a bouquet of flowers in one hand, wearing the very same outfit she’d met her for the second time in. Her face was beet-red, eyes wobbly and embarrassed, unable to focus on any one thing at any one time. If anything, the severity of awkwardness Kara worked under was always surprising. Supergirl was always confident, always sure, and Kara was the dead opposite. Kara was never sure-footed, always cautious, always ready to apologize.

But here she was, of her own volition, with a bouquet clutched in one hand, wearing what Lena was pretty sure was the fanciest thing she owned. After having just rushed in, ignoring Jess’ protests, and asked her on a date.

Jess, shell shocked and stunned, stood in the entryway to her office.

Kara, awkward and sheepish, stood not too far from the couch, fidgeting in place.

Lena, breathing in, then out, kept the smile from her face, if only to not look like a _complete_ doofus. “You could’ve texted me.” Or called, really.

Kara’s flush grew brighter. “I wanted to ask in person.”

That was Kara for you. An oxymoron in every sense of the word, kind and caring and so, so very passionate. A girl who was very set in her ways, a girl Lena didn’t deserve, but couldn’t quite bring herself to resist.

“How does Friday at twelve sound?”


End file.
